Sunday, April 17, 2016

Why I have voted in support of BDS

From
the 15th of April and until the end of May members of the American
Anthropological Association will be voting on whether to endorse the proposal
to boycott Israeli academic institutions as part of offering to support the
Palestnians’ call for a Boycotts, Sanctions and Divestments (BDS) movement against
the state of Israel. I have voted in support of the resolution. As the vote has
been an occasion whereby AAA has initiated and encouraged a more public
discussion of the pros and cons of the BDS movement, I wish to share my
understanding of the nature of the opposition between those who are for and
against BDS and why I personally, as a AAA member, support it.

To
be sure, almost all of the anthropologists who are against the Boycott begin by
stating their opposition to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian
Territories or the treatment of Palestinians inside the state of Israel. So the
debate is not, nor one expects it to be, a simple debate between ‘critics and
supporters of the state of Israel’. Yet, the difference between the two camps
is quite pronounced and it begins to emerge in the very way those opposed to
BDS declare their objection and opposition to the Occupation. In their very
starting point there is a regressive attempt at shifting the grounds of the
debate away from where the supporters of BDS have located it.

The
starting point of those who support BDS is not that all those who do not agree
with them are supporters of the occupation. It is that for a long time now
there has been a groundswell of people critical of the occupation (inside
Israel sometimes even more than outside of Israel). But this has not had any
influence whatsoever on the occupation. Indeed the road to the settlements is
paved with people deploring or being opposed to one aspect or another of the
occupation, people calling for dialogue, deploring Israeli war crimes and even
genocide, and calling for Israeli accountability or for investigations, etc…
The BDS supporters’ argument is: so, given how useless all this sometimes quite
radical ‘position taking’ has been, can we start something that has a slightly,
even if minimally, coercive effect on the state of Israel rather than just something
that is merely voicing a ‘critique’. Israel creates facts on the ground in its
colonization and what is needed is an opposition that is not a mere opinion but
one that also strives to create a fact on the ground. It is by looking at what
is available in terms of peaceful and democratic strategies that can have such
a factual effect that the idea of a boycott came into being. So to oppose BDS
by calling for the very things that BDS is trying to supersede because proven
ineffective, such as more critique or calls for dialogue, is disingenious to
say the least. It is considered an implicit call for the continuation of the
status quo. The same goes for mistaking the boycott for a ‘statement of extreme
condemnation’ instead of seeing it for what it is: a strategically appropriate,
and above all practical, technique of protest against a social force that might
be vulnerable to such a technique. In this regard the people who exclaim ‘why don’t
you boycott China, etc…’ fail to see how nonsensical such a position is. It is
like saying that if you are opposed to both the British Prime Minister and the
President of Syria and are calling for the democratic removal of the British
Prime Minister, you are a hypocrite if you don’t also call for the democratic
removal of the President of Syria. ‘Calling for democratic removal’ like
‘calling for a boycott’ works in one place and not in another.

There
is no doubt that we the supporters of BDS have a more acute sense of the quantitative
and qualitative degree of injustice and suffering that is being meted on
Palestinians in Israel and the territories. For the opponents of BDS in the
words of Marc Edelman writing for PoLAR, the outrage of BDS activists is excessive,
‘outsized’ as he put it, in that Palestinian suffering is comparatively not so
great compared to that of others. According to him 'in the spectrum of violator
(ie, violators of human rights) states worldwide, Israel only attains middling
status'. BDS people do not have such a relaxed view of what is happening in
Israel/Palestine either quantitatively or qualitatively. They expect that most
anthropologists would agree with them that thinking comparatively about, and
ranking, states according to how much they 'violate human rights' is a
homogenizing mode of thinking that mystifies the difference between forms of
violation and erases the specific ugliness of colonial settler situations. Most
anthropologists, especially those who are located in settler colonial settings
themselves, are well aware that colonial injury goes way beyond the common
understanding of 'human right violations and abuse': it includes appropriation
and extraction of land and resources, ethnocidal politics that cannot be
accounted for by counting the number of people killed, politicide (see Israeli
sociologist Baruch Kimmerling about this) that eviscerates a whole culture. And
then there is the racialised violence that is also a very specific form of
violence which impact is an equally specific and incomparably damaging
shattering of the psyche. Not being able to experience affectively the urgency
of the need to address what is happening in Palestine is nothing short of a
professional failing.

There
are also some who think that boycotting universities is not appropriate because
one needs to maintain the autonomy of academic life from political processes. Wherever
one is located in the world today, this is a rather fantasmic belief in this
day and age where states and neo-liberal capitalist logic have eaten their way
through university autonomy almost to the point of saturation. But it
particularly lacks validity in a colonial context where the very nature of a
university as an open democratic space is itself dependent on the very colonial
violence that disallows and violently suppresses the possible existence of such
an open space among those it colonises. Paradoxically, in a colonial-settler
society, even the space from which one can be ‘pro-indigenous’ is dependent on
the colonial violence that allows such a space to exist. As it happens, in
Israel’s universities, the very idea of being pro-indigenous is quasi
impossible, expressed only by a negligible minority. What there is instead is
an academic indifference and obliviousness to the deadly, remorseless and
excessive colonial violence directed at the Palestnians and their universities,
the very violence that makes such indifference possible in the Israeli
universities: so much for autonomy.

There
is always a critique that one can and should address to any form of political
action, which by definition has and will be found to have many weaknesses. But
there are critiques aimed at enhancing a political practice and others aimed at
paralyzing it. It is very easy to use some idealized, beautiful and full-proof
conception of action to shelter from the imperfections of any actual struggle since
the latter is guaranteed to be found always already wanting. It is possible to
tell oneself: 'I am not going to do anything since no action meets my
unbelievably pure criteria of what needs to be done’. I don’t think it is
coincidental that such an attitude ends up working to support the status quo. For those of us who do feel the urgency of
dealing with Palestinian question this is not enough and we hope that most of
my colleagues share our sense of urgency.